Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday June 01, 2017 @10:45PM
from the money-back-guaranteed dept.

Economists Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Mohammad H. Mostafavi-Dehzooeifrom for the Economic Research Forum have released a new report on the results of a basic income scheme launched in Iran in 2011. "In 2011, in response to heavy cuts to oil and gas subsidies, Iran implemented a program that guaranteed citizens cash payments of 29 percent of the nation's median income, which amounts to about $1.50 every day (about $16,000 per year in the U.S.)," reports The Outline. Here are the key findings: The report found no evidence for the idea that people will work less under a universal income, and found that in some cases, like in the service industry, people worked more, expanding their businesses or pursuing more satisfying lines of work. The researchers did find that young people -- specifically people in their twenties -- worked less, but noted that Iran never had a high level of employment among young people, and that they were likely enrolling in school with the added income. The evidence presented in the paper is compelling, but the anecdotal belief that handing people money will make them lazy is hard to shake. "The findings in this paper do not settle this question," the report's authors point out. "What we have accomplished is at the very least to shift the burden of proof on this issue to those who claim cash transfer [sic] make poor people lazy, and to show the need for better data and more research."

They're not talking about "incentives from employers". They're talking about the personal incentive ("incentive (n): something that incites or tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity.") to work. Aka, under most welfare systems, there's a "welfare cliff" where if a person works more, their income actually drops as they lose their benefits - and thus there's a disincentive to work past that cliff. Under UBI, there is no such cliff - the more you work, the more you earn.

It's a serious issue. A lot of people who are on benefits for various physical or mental disabilities have "marginal" ability to work. Many want to work, but are afraid that if they take on a job, lose their benefits, and then it ultimately turns out that their condition prevents them from fulfilling the job requirements (a very real risk), that they'll be screwed. It keeps a lot of people who might actually be able to work out of the job marketplace for no good reason.

Why are you still talking as if the GP was talking about employer-provided incentives when the GP was very clearly talking about personal incentives? It's almost looking as if you were trying to make a point about something else and decided to inject it into the conversation here because someone used a word you felt you could chain off of.

And yes, low-end wages can be expected to go down with UBI - as they should. Minimum wage should disappear, because it's just one of the many pieces of a patchwork currently in use to approximate a UBI. In turn, corporate tax rates can rise (compensating for the windfall to employers for not having to pay as much), in turn helping pay for the UBI.

That said, your notion that people would tend to only try to work up to $1200/mo take-home income (far below the US poverty line) is silly. And contradicted by the study that forms the basis of this Slashdot article.

Salaries will drop, such that the personal incentives for work stay just as modest as they are now.

Not necessarily. Salaries will only drop if people are willing to work for less, which is not a given. A possibility equal to your scenario is that, with UBI place, people who feel more secure when employment lapses will not be willing to work for less and will demand more. Also possible, as the article alluded to, is people who feel they are not offered high enough wages may be more able to seek education or training so that they can move into a new job market that pays more, which would put upward pressure on wages. Markets are complicated.

But what would happen in an UBI system with someone who gets the same amount of children ? Would they starve, because the UBI level is fixed ? If that is what we want, we can simply remove the welfare payouts for extra children.

I obviously can't speak for that person, but I can theorize why that might still be a rational choice. There are quite possibly more factors at work. She could have had more expenses associated with being employed such as childcare that narrowed the actual benefit of that earned income. She could also have just decided that the extra cost of a higher rent made the work not worth doing. Even at that low level of wages taxes and such can easily chew up 25% of the pay check, and while some of that will come ba

Depends. You suffered because the Navy retirees had extra money coming in and you didn't. With a UBI, everyone would have the extra money coming in. (Yeah, we need to make provisions for non-US citizens here.) On the other hand, nobody's forced into a crap job instead of homelessness and starvation, so the crap jobs will likely pay more.

Lots of the money that would go into the UBI already comes out of taxes. This would remove the need for normal welfare benefits, for example, and would cover a lot of what Social Security does (including disability). The additional money would require raises in taxes. At some income, the extra taxes would take away all of the UBI, and people at higher incomes would lose some money.

On the other hand, we could save nearly a trillion a year by adopting the next most expensive health care system in the wo

Why though? The idea of UBI is that it doesn't change if you get paid for a regular job. You'd get your UBI plus whatever you earn for working.

I guess you could say you're getting out of paying taxes, but how is that any different from the current system where you work at a job and pay taxes on that income? There's no additional incentive from the existence of UBI specifically. I suppose you could argue that payroll taxes are needed to fund it, but that's a big assumption, and many of the cases for UBI assume it's coming from something else (since it often comes in scenarios where there just isn't enough work/jobs for everyone due to automation or such).

Properly designed, everyone collects a UBI, except for the people in the 1% who actually earns so much money, they're the one's paying taxes to support UBI.

The 1% don't have enough wealth (let alone income) to pay for a meaningful UBI for the remaining 99%, even if you confiscated all of it—which would be obviously self-defeating unless you could somehow stop that wealth from fleeing the country the moment the proposal was seriously considered. More realistically it would be the upper 50-70% paying extra taxes so that the rest can receive a net increase in income, with the majority of the funding coming from the middle class. If you're above the median a

Pretty much, although its more about addressing the fact that 75% of current jobs are going to get wiped out by automation, and that automation is not going to create 75% new jobs. Basic presumptions about how the capitalist system needs to be re-examined, including whether the threat of survival is required in order for capitalism to function (I seriously doubt that).

Would you be completely unproductive with your extra free time though? If you worked on some open source hobby project instead it's not like the world is worse off. Yes I realize that's not the most efficient use of capital, and yes there are some who won't be productive with their time, but if it means some criminals will also be less productive with their time it means society probably sees some cost savings on the other end.

The U.S. already spends huge sums of money on myriad social programs. Simplify

Socialism has nothing to do with Venezuela and you damned well know it. Maduro is NOT a socialist. He's a corrupt dictator who is tearing down the socialist constructs of that country. In other words, as usual, it is another case of conservative authoritarians who are fleecing the country. Reason: CORRUPTION! Human Nature!

Oh please. I made no such allusion at all. Using your logic, we have a panel of dictators here in America. They're called The House, The Senate, and the Supreme Court (and we don't even get a choice with these judges). That is ridiculous. The raiding of the state's coffers is the issue. And I mean actual raiding, as in stealing. Taxes, entitlements, subsidies, etc are not stealing. That is wealth that is recirculated in the general economy. I mean when people like Maduro take the money and buy them

... also another major point is that Venezuela has had an unprecedented drought that's stuck since 2013. That's not hard to check out, and it's crippled agriculture. Coupled with the sustained drop in oil prices, these two factors have in fact devastated food production and imports simultaneously.

The other side of the coin is in fact a thing called "price controls" and those aren't necessarily a socialist measure, they're a tactic used by many governments when inflation is getting out of hand. This is the r

And you know what the Tories and other good and faithful followers of our divinely-appointed King called those people back then? LEFTISTS!

Actually, no. The Left/Right thing came about as a result of the French Revolution more than 10 years afterwards. Literally, your political leanings determined whether you sat on the left side of the French legislative chamber or the right side. The term "Right" has nothing to do with being right, or of Rights.

Please understand finally that extremism wants to take your liberties. Left or right doesn't really matter here, any extremist ideology puts the ideology over your personal freedoms.

Thank you. Glad to see someone gets it.

People like to say that the whole R/D thing is just like sports, where you cheer your own team and boo the other one.

But in sports, you're not rooting for the complete, total, and eternal annihilation of the other team. You play the game, you win or lose, no hard feelings (well, not many) and you come back again for a rematch. And again next season. The team is important, but the game is everything.

Ideology is a game for idiots. And far too many people are obsessive players.

Your statement is absolutely false, and has no basis in reality. Money does not "fix" addiction, and proof is simply looking at the long list of addicts who are/were extremely wealthy. How about Jimi Hendrix, Bon Scott, John Bonham, Kurt Cobain, or Whitney Houston? Don't like musicians, how about politicians like Rob Fort, Senator Crapo, or Marion Barry? Drugs are not good enough? How about alcohol like Ted Kennedy? How about Porn/Sex like Anthony Weiner? You should be able to do your own research fr

Because your drinking may cause you to lose your shitty job, or the stress/boredom of not being able to move forward socially or accomplish goals can drive you to drinking. Hence, why alcoholism and opioid addiction are often found in towns where industry has died.

That doesn't seem supportable. Many towns with factory work have alcohol and opioid abuse problems; and many employers allow their employees to just not come to work high. I've known people who were sent home for shitting their pants while high on heroin.

Much of the time, the people with the lowest incomes or the greatest difficulty sustaining employment end up with substance abuse problems. Conversely, people with high addiction potential--those with alleles encoding delta-FosB more-readily in reward

Problems we have with our current welfare system would be exacerbated greatly.

Except that one big problem with our current welfare system is that if you work, you lose welfare benefits, and this creates a disincentive against working. A Universal Basic Income would come with no such restrictions.

The system is actually closer to what central Europe has than what's going on in Venezuela. And we're currently stress testing whether the system works when thousands over thousands of people flock into it...

People that currently work to afford drug and alcohol addictions would now have no need to work, so society as a whole gains a dependent class at the expense of those who want to produce.

The thing is, people whop work just to get money to fund an addiction are most likely working jobs that are going to be gone anyway in the next couople of decades. That is, someone working a warehousing or a fast food job just to be able to afford booze is not going to be able to find work in the future regardless because a

First flaw: Ignoring how money gets into the system to pay out a UBI for 330 Million people. Print more like the Weimark Republic which ends up with collapse due to inflation (takes more than the current GDP of the USA to pay a basic living wage to the populace) or tax the producers. The latter already happens at a staggeringly high rate and we can't pay our current bills.

The idea of UBI has been around for at least 70 years and nobody has seen any working models. You already hinted at hating reality, bu

You dont understand what UBI is. UBI is not promising prosperty for all, it is promising the basics (literally the "B" in the acronym). People have to give up all their liberties under UBI? You're just making up undesirable atributes for UBI now. What liberties would be lost under a policy of UBI?

You also decided to completely ignore my point that the failed states you mention used COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SYSTEMS and then you just repeated yourself. UBI is the same as these failed state communist policies because they both try to help people? Are apples the same as oranges because they're both food? What about social security, public education, public roads or any one of hundreds of other policies that exist to help people that exist in every successfull country in the world?

There are no negative examples for UBI because there are literally no examples of UBI in any form of meaningfull practice.

Your only valid point is that there are no positive examples of UBI which certainly does not mean it's doomed to failure as it is an untested idea. It only means it is not garunteed to succeed which I would certainly agree with.

Good answer Comrade! But then why did China and Russia stagnate for many decades in terms of both production and innovation while the US became the biggest innovator the world has ever seen? Why did China have to move to a partial market economy to promote innovation and productivity, instead of pushing out a bigger and better UBI program than the world has ever seen? Why did Russia also move to a partial market economy to promote innovation and productivity?

Obviously nobody would work (for someone else) if they could keep any arbitrary standard of living and not work.

But if you had the choice between either getting every third paycheck doubled for the same amount of work, or else living on a third of your income for zero work, which would you pick? I sure as hell know I would keep working and just pocket the extra money to reach my life goals sooner, rather than live a life of bare subsistence just so that I could sit around doing nothing.

A world where fewer people are working because more people are capable of retiring sooner sounds like exactly the kind of world we should always be striving toward. The end goal of human progress is for everyone to be born into perpetual retirement.

My personal life goals are just to pay off any house at all (which currently is a lifelong task I'm not sure I will ever finish), after which the remaining costs of living are small enough to be easily covered by a minimal amount of work (or a reasonable retirement investment), freeing up my time to spend doing creative projects that I want done for their own sake and not ruined by limits and requirements set by marketability.

I would work less if I didn't have to work for my income. Am I the only one?

I also thought this until I retired. I do more now than I did when I was working. And more of that work actually does something for my community. No, I don't put in the "hours" like a wage slave, but the work is more productive and meaningful and fun for me.

No, but realize it also goes the other way too. I'm a biomedical researcher, I'll likely make more money quitting cutting edge research at a university and going into pharmecutical work. I'll be doing stuff that will have less risk of failing, but also has very little chance of being a big breakthrough. I'd love to continue doing what I am now, but I can't due to salary reasons. If money weren't an issue, I'd keep doing the high risk/high reward science as I am now.

My job puts food on the table and a roof over my head, sure, but I'm working mainly to accomplish stuff I can take pride in. If the necessities were guaranteed, I think plenty of people would take riskier work in order to feel accomplished.

I might work less at my current job. That doesn't mean I would sit on my butt and watch Netflix all day.

I've actually had periods where I wasn't employed for a reasonable stretch of time. Sure, I did a bunch of video gaming at first, but pretty soon I got bored and restless, and needed to find something productive to do. So yes, I'd find something useful to occupy my time. I might not be punching a clock at a corporate office, though - I might start doing independent hacking and vulnerability research for instance. I might set out coding new apps, or other such things. I might do something entirely different like learn more about automotive computer networks. But I sure wouldn't be idle.

UBI doesn't make vast amounts of money for comfortable living appear out of thin air. 29% of the average US household take-home income is under $14k. The poverty line in the US is around $22k.

UBI offers a replacement for welfare, social security, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and countless other things. Total combined welfare in the US ranged from [washingtonpost.com] $16984 (Mississippi) to $49175 (Hawaii) in 2013 (everything from direct payments to assistance for food, housing, energy, etc, both federal and state), according to the conservative Cato Institute. Social Security in the US averages $16k. Minimum wage is $15.1k. Etc. So keep those numbers in perspective. To put $14k a different way, that's $1167 per month - and given that a household is not supposed to spend more than 30% of their income on rent (greater than 30% is defined as "rent burdened"), that would suggest a rent of no more than $350 per month. And we're talking household income here, not individual. And that's income that would be without other added assistance (food, housing, etc), unless your goal is to double up the welfare system rather than replace it.

The big difference with today's welfare patchworks is that UBI is far more efficient (no huge bureaucratic mess, no "hoops" for people to jump through to prove qualifications, etc), doesn't have "cracks" for people to fall through. doesn't have any "cliffs" that disincentivize people to work further, etc. You don't "lose benefits" by working more - any extra work you do is extra income. To move you from poverty wages (UBI) to having the resources to not have to live in a dump, to be able to afford a vehicle, electronics, whatever it is that you enjoy in life. And if you really are the rare sort of person who actually likes living on poverty wages rather than working... well, that probably already describes your situation today.

Yes, the people trying to make a living with streams and videos will certainly increase. But I doubt that the low paying jobs will go. Rather, they will get cheaper for the employers and you will deal with a LOT higher fluctuation. Which isn't really a problem because, well, how much training time do you need for someone who sweeps your floors or stocks your shelves?

What you'll have is people who want to buy something and need money for it that they don't have with UBI alone, so they'll go and work for a week or two. As an employer, you'll probably have to pay less, too, because now they only want "extra" money from you, not the money they need to sustain themselves.

I'm not sure you can compare it that way. There is a huge difference between 16k/year in the USA and $1.50/day ($550/year) in Iran. Sure you might be able to feed yourself in both places for that same amount but there are significant differences. Someone in Iran will never be able to buy a car with his salary. It would take more than a year salary to buy a plane ticket or a smart phone. Someone in the USA on the other hand if they managed to save a year's salary over say a decade could move to somepl

per year extra hell yah I'd still work (Mind you I own my own business) but still $1200 extra per month is a lot of money to do things lots of people wouldn't be able to do other wise. Hell with $1200 extra I could use that to run a second online business.

Precisely, the provision of minimal support in general simply alleviates some of the burdens of class divide. Enabling more people to exercise creativity and advance the economy has greater gains than the dog-eat-dog model allows.

per year extra hell yah I'd still work (Mind you I own my own business) but still $1200 extra per month is a lot of money to do things lots of people wouldn't be able to do other wise. Hell with $1200 extra I could use that to run a second online business.

Well it should be pointed out that if you are a successful businessman you would either see no increase in income or more likely a decrease in income from the implementation of basic income. My arbitrary guess is a family with around $100k in income would see no change in income (they would get a basic income check of $1200 per month and pay $1200 more in taxes per month), while everyone under that gets more money and everyone over that gets less money. Basic income only makes sense when paid for by a progr

In Switzerland, we had a vote for Universal Income. Here the following system was used. if you have income, you will not get an additional $1200. You will get nothing. The way it works is that $1200 is taken away from your income and then the same amount is placed back.

This is to make sure that you always have at least $1200 no matter what you do. So if you actually earn already more than $1200, there is no change for you. That means, that you would most likely not get any extra under universal income. Heck

The argument against basic income is not about laziness, it's where the money comes from. Gather 5 of your friends and implement basic income. Those who earn less than the BI gets paid by money collected from those who earn more than the BI. Post back the results. Do it among 10, 20, or 30 of friends, all without the need for any government or politicians. Good luck.

Ok, but now exempt those 5 friends from paying social security, from paying any taxes that contribute to welfare, or any taxes that pay for or run any other wealth redistribution scheme already in effect. Then give them payments equal to the massive tax incentives given by local and state governments to corporations looking to bring jobs to their area.
Those 5 friends might just do alright.

This happens regularly, actually. At the most basic level, in families, when one member has a physical or mental illness that prevents work, or when somebody loses a job, what do you think happens? Somebody with extra space offers a couch or a basement for a while, etc. Parents support adult children, spouses live off of a single income for a while, etc.

The same thing happens in church communities and presumably other, similar groups - people pool resources to help those in need.

It's a fundamentally decent thing to do. Basic income isn't meant to be a freebie to allow free loaders to lay around, but to help people in a rough patch. In a similar way, families support members in need. In both cases, sometimes the system can be taken advantage of, but that's just an inherent part of human nature, and you do what you can to incentivize self-sufficiency.

I'm not pissed about it. Only wankers get pissed about helping out the needy. It's an investment in the future of this country, and it benefits everyone. Less problems, less crime, less strain on medical services, more productivity. Yeah, maybe you can't afford that new big screen TV because of it. Boohoo.

I'm pissed about it because it's destroying civilization. Every benefit you said is a lie.

Well, I take that back, it's not "helping the needy" it's HOW they help the needy. Unrestricted welfare and medical care creates more problems than they solve for societies, developed and developing. In the US, about half of babies are born on Medicaid. The Medicaid budget is out of control. And yet poor people have the most kids. That's not a very good cycle to be in. Just read an article about England's NHS service considering a plan to let people prioritize their appointments by paying extra, because they need the money. Germany is spending billions on welfare for refugees, and there's basically an unlimited supply of refugees... they can overwhelm any budget. (And yes that's related, the refugees are passing up relatively stingy countries and being drawn to countries with better welfare benefits such as Germany and Sweden.)

You need to take a look at the median income worldwide sometime. Then consider whether you reeeeeally want to redistribute wealth to "help the needy." There are too many needy. Help for the needy has to be done in concert with stuff like long term birth control. And it has to be done in a way that doesn't interfere with the producers of wealth, i.e. the middle class. Otherwise it's the equivalent of eating your seed corn.

Just read an article about England's NHS service considering a plan to let people prioritize their appointments by paying extra, because they need the money.

You need to look into this more before using it as an argument. The reason the NHS in 'England' is suffering is because of Conservative party policies. Ideas like these are floated because it is (Conservative) Government policy at the moment to run down the services and thus show that the NHS needs more privatisation. This is not speculation - current Government ministers have been involved in writing planning documents and books outlining just these policies.

Slashdot headline reads "A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income" yet quoted in the article "The researchers did find that young people - specifically people in their twenties - worked less"

Sooo... yea. I realize Slashdot has become a new social justice platform but c'mon, this is at least the third universal basic income propaganda post of the week and it's certainly stretching the boundaries of legitimate.

Pretty sure it was meant that people didn't work less on the average, even if specific groups did work less. It was thought that people in their 20s were going to school instead of working right away, which is probably beneficial to the country in the long run. It's like how dropping out of school after 6th grade to work on the family farm is no longer considered a good decision long-term.

Yes. College age kids are more likely to spend their time doing things like going to college rather than working an entry level no skill job, if given the choice. It's a shocking proposition, I know.

Although many folks like to push "more college" as the solution, we actually have too many people going to college as it is.

Of course college is very important to those that can benefit from the experience, it doesn't change the fact that many people find that after graduating college they aren't actually ahead of the game and missed out of 4-6 years of work experience on their resume and are only employed in positions that don't actually require college degrees.

In the post-scarcity automated job-scarce world, this is just an inefficient use of resources and a giant waste of human capital. You are probably better off with a make-work program for college aged folks that likely won't have jobs that require college degrees at the end of the line than to let them live off of UBI and not develop any work skills that allow them to potentially contribute to society more in the future rather than get stuck in a welfare trap (albeit more gilded than the current one).

I acquired a passive income 15 years ago that was roughly equivalent to a UBI. I left my job and let someone else have that income while I developed a new business that I never could have built otherwise. Awesome result with one big caveat: After 10 years my passive income started looking less secure and I suddenly realised I'd been kidding myself about how hard I'd been working. I doubled my productivity instantly.

I had become less productive with a guaranteed income, but even so the effort has given our community a new business that brings in tourist dollars.

May be the perfect formula doesn't actually require 40 hours per week. Maybe we can afford for most people to be a bit less productive (call it more lazy if you like).

I say we should give UBI a try - at least throw a moderate budget into some more thorough research.

What's it matter if people work less due to UBI? If a UBI is implemented due to automation permanently displacing jobs at a faster rate than new jobs can be created, then it would be expected that people would be working less. Even if that's not the case, it's not necessarily due to laziness. Many old people who would/should be retired, find work because their retirement savings/pension/social security payments are inadequate for their lifestyle (or any lifestyle, potentially.) Others are effectively disabled, alcoholic, or otherwise 'can' work but only at great disadvantage, generally through no fault of their own; many of these people are considered unemployable. Others aren't disabled but have some medical issue (arthritis etc.) that causes great pain doing any work; some people hurt standing for long periods of time, or can't sit still for long periods of time. Are these people 'lazy'? If so, does that mean they deserve to starve to death in the gutter?

As easy, unambitious jobs go away, layabouts won't suddenly rise to the occasion and gain some professional skills; they'll complain that there's no jobs, and continue being leeches (usually, on their family and friends.) In reality I don't think many of these people exist, they tend to either a) do odd jobs, or bounce from job to job constantly, or b) are low-grade criminals, petty thieves et cetera. In both cases, it probably costs society less to just hand them some money to leave the rest of society alone.

found that in some cases, like in the service industry, people worked more, expanding their businesses or pursuing more satisfying lines of work

That right there is the fly in the ointment. Simply working isn't enough. You have to do work producing something other people want, not necessarily what you want. Work has value because it produces something other members of society are demanding. If a UBI allows you to quit a productive job in order to start an unproductive one (e.g. artist), the net result is that the country's productivity decreases, and the standard of living drops. (Which means the UBI has to be increased to keep it at the level of "basic", starting a vicious cycle of continuing productivity declines and UBI increases.)

As an extreme example, nobody wants to collect garbage, repair toilets, clean septic tanks, etc. But because it's needed, society pays a lot for it - enough to entice some individuals to live with the stink and do it for a living. If a UBI causes some of these people to quit and take up more "satisfying" lines of work, the prices of these services will go up, resulting in less income available for people to spend on other things, resulting in the UBI not buying as much as it used to, resulting in the government increasing the UBI to compensate for its decreased purchasing power, resulting in more people switching to more "satisfying" work, resulting in more prices going up, etc.

The economy wants to price things according to how much society values it. Attempting to thwart that with a UBI or minimum wage doesn't make that tendency disappear. The economy just interprets that as damage to the system, and routes around it - by devaluing the currency to lessen the impact of the fixed value of the UBI or minimum wage on prices.

You don't understand what UBI is. It's not a utopian wage until we have utopian levels of productivity (ie. robots that do all of the jobs you list). In the in-between time (the debatable period in which automation is putting people out of work faster than new jobs are created) it's a dollar amount that keeps food in your belly and a roof over your head. Want a TV, a sensible car, or any number of other luxury? You'll be quite happy to work any of those jobs you list and at fairly low wages as your basics a

"What we have accomplished is at the very least to shift the burden of proof on this issue to those who claim cash transfer [sic] make poor people lazy,

No you/they haven't. Burden of proof to support a costly program or scheme does not work that way: You have the burden, and your concept doesn't have merit until you've proven it ---- showing a little bit of evidence doesn't change the burden of proof to someone else's. The burden of proof remains to show that Universal Basic Income provides more value than it costs in order to justify this radical scheme.

As for the evidence that providing Food or resources without having to work for it promotes Laziness or failing results ---- the strong exemplars of this happening are readily available throughout history. Communism/Socialism to any degree reduces production and doesn't create sustainable economies; history's littered with numerous examples...

That single line torpedoes their entire "study". To rephrase the article summary in more honest words: "we found that people did work less, but we're just going to assume that they're going to school instead".

You can prove anything you want when you're willing to hand-wave away any data you don't like.

To rephrase the article summary in more honest words: "we found that people did work less, but we're just going to assume that they're going to school instead".

You failed to rephrase honestly. An honest rephrasing is "We found that people in the age category where people typically attend post-secondary schools did work less, so we assume they went to school instead". The reduction in paid work was only seen in that one category.

That single line torpedoes their entire "study".

No, it just means that another study should be done to find out what people in that age category actually did.

Standard method in science is to stay narrow, not alter protocol midway through investigation or research.

But that's exactly what this conclusion does. The question the study was looking into was "do people work less when given a universal basic income". They looked at the data, and saw that the answer was "yes". Instead of saying "yes, UBI does decrease how much people work" they said "no it doesn't, but, like, it does in this one group over here, but, um, we're going to assume that's because they're going to school".

It begs a study into THAT question

Yes, absolutely, that should be looked into. But whether or not a followup study occurs do

Net effect, the rich stay rich and everyone else is in the same situation they were in. There is only one reason why people are pushing this. It will allow them to stay in power. If we follow the money from which this will all come from, it will show who is trying to establish their control over not just a single country, but the world. Once they accomplish this, reversing it will almost impossible except outright conflict.

Rich are fine and the middle class gets their standard of living dragged far closer to those on UBI. It is a fact that the rich can not pay the bills, they are too large. The middle class will be the ones who pay for this.

What would stop employers from lowering their salaries by whatever the "universal income" amount might be

The free market for labor. You can't just arbitrarily lower salaries and still expect to be able to attract enough workers. If anything, employers will need to raise salaries, since potential employees will have less incentive to work.

If anything, employers will need to raise salaries, since potential employees will have less incentive to work.

Employers would need to get better in all parts. When the populace no longer fears for their lives upon losing their job, they would be far more apt to quit a shitty job to find something better. Over a generation or two it'd weed out bad businesses, making the country more efficient with higher quality output and faster economic growth.

But I don't know what I'm talking about. Walmart would probably find a way to game the system like do currently.

it's basically 4 trillion dollars so they would have to double the federal budget to pay for this. Bare minimum, everyone's tax rate doubles. This is based on total outlays vs total income. Remember that FICA is just another source of income for the feds, an effective ~15% tax before any income tax is considered. Then there is all the excise, corporate, etc taxes. It's easy to say they can get the money, but there are not enough rich people to just stick with the bill. It will land on the middle class like every other tax increase does and we will be stuck with a standard of living much closer to those on universal basic income.

Where the money would come from. Google says there are 243,000,000 working age people in the US. Multiplied by $16,000 that is

$3888000000000

lol

That is ridiculous. Obviously not everyone would see a net increase of $16k per year. There would be some threshold where people make $16,000 per year in basic income and pay an extra $16,000 in taxes per year (lets say at around $75k household income). Everyone under that threshold gets more money because of basic income and everyone over that threshold are the ones funding the program.

The bottom 50% of income earners currently pay 2.75% of federal income taxes. It's safe to say these are the ones who woul

Are you saying recovered income and payroll taxes on the UBI payments?

People making between $75k-$200k in income would probably see income tax increases between $150-$400 per month.

Jeeze we're slowly turning into a slave society where the middle class works for the unholy alliance of the ultra rich and the dirt poor. About half of all births are on Medicaid now, and the rich get to virtue signal by raising taxes.

I hope the middle class has the foresight, while still a voting majority, to do something like say "Receiving UBI payments requires you to get lon

Instead of a UBI, make it a 'PBI' (progressive basic income). Say the BI is $10K, and we are not including this in income. Once you're earning $5K, the BI reduces 25c per $. So once you're earning $45K, you're not actually getting any of that $10K, which is fine because you don't need it. This GREATLY reduces the cost, yet still has the advantages of the safety net and eliminating most of the welfare overhead. I haven't run the numbers for my country (Australia), and likely won't with a kid around when I'm

No, it would only scale directly with inflation if everyone got a proportional bonus. Bill Gates getting $16k extra a year doesn't change anything for him, but it does change things for someone making $20k.

Where I live (Republican Utah) most the people I talk to don't disagree that global warning is happening. They just argue that it's either not our (the US's) problem or that it's not as critical as it sounds. That the "science" community is hyping it up too much. It's hard to hold a straight face and not get mad but that is there perspective.

Very few people I talk with don't believe in evolution. They believe that evolution was the tool god used to create humans. Because genesis was written before we had a